CCD Optical Tomography System to Detect Solid Contamination in Crystal-Clear Water

The existence of foreign objects in crystal-clear water in beverage industries may cause major safety and health issues. The current observation of solid contamination such as X-ray and metal detector involves hazardous radiation. Some of the sensors applied intrusive and invasive techniques. This may cause the instability of the process flow. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a noninvasive and nonintrusive charge-coupled device optical tomography (CCD OPT) system to detect solid contamination in crystal-clear water. Investigations on three different opacity levels of objects, opaque, translucent, and transparent, are involved. The first experiment investigates the velocity and acceleration of the free-falling object. It is conducted to validate the accuracy of the system to detect the appearance of foreign object. The experiment result indicated that the system reached 82 accuracy. The second experiment reconstructs cross-sectional image of the process flow. The image reconstruction results are analyzed using the area error (AE) method. The image reconstruction AE range is between 0.0372 and 0.7269. The AE results show that the system has the capability to detect different opacity of objects which exist in crystal-clear water. Both experiments prove that the CCD OPT system is able to detect solid contamination in crystal-clear water.